Glitter of her Loss
by Neko Kuroban
Summary: Veronica is no longer that girl.


Veronica (_used to be_) is the kind of girl who maps out her agenda at the beginning of the school year in August, writing significant dates in pink surrounded by embellishments in green – flowering branches and caricatures of herself and her friends, stars and spirals.

Sitting across from her in last period study hall, chin pressed against her palm and a cascade of corn silk hair draped over the homework she is neglecting, Lilly mocks this, but that is Lilly. Lilly does as she pleases, regardless of prior plans or consequences. She skips fittings for her pageant dresses and regularly cancels her lessons with the most expensive voice coach in Balboa County. For years, she has been transforming missing first period in favor of coffee at a dive near the beach into an art form.

For Veronica, though, certain events – _not_ obligations – are immovable. 

Homecoming is on the last weekend in September, but quickly jotted notes throughout the month crowd the margins: reminders to buy a dress, to buy a bra that does not show (written in code as "go on youth group retreat with church" in case she loses the agenda, which seems terribly clever at the time), to find shoes that she does not hate.

Duncan and Veronica share a birthday on the last day of the month, a handful of days after the dance. She makes no note of her own birthday, only doodles a cluster of balloons and bold letters for his. That was how she met him on the first day of kindergarten; the assembled children in Mrs. Patterson's class had been arranged by date of birth rather than by the alphabet, so that the younger ones were in the front. Veronica and Duncan had been placed together in the final row, with three other kids whose birthdays had fallen shy of the cut-off date the previous year and a girl named Marley who was head and shoulders taller than everyone year repeating the year.

The first time Duncan garnered the nerve to ask the sheriff's daughter out – bowling, which was the most innocuous thing he could think of – was on November 11, 2002. She fills the box marking (_what would have been_) their first anniversary with red and violet hearts struck through with Eros's arrows.

Lilly's birthday (_was_) is Christmas Day, which always seemed fitting to Veronica. The Kanes were Jewish, but Christmas (_used to be_) is such a warm, happy time for Veronica, a merry explosion of cheer and good will to men and the kind of effusions at which both Lilly and Veronica's mother excel(_ed_).

Valentine's Day earns a teddy bear clutching a heart. She clips it from the copy of _Seventeen_ Lilly had been reading. (It was actually Meg's; Lilly hadn't bothered with _Seventeen_ since middle school, except to tear out the perfume samples and the pages with information on STDs and why one should avoid wearing thongs while sleeping and stuff them into Wanda Varner's locker, which Lilly claimed would never get old.) The lace-edged heart the thing holds declares that it loves her _beary much_. Lilly, a pendant (that was Veronica's term; the older girl would cheerfully describe herself as "grammar Nazi"), had crossed out _beary_ a thousand times with a cheap pen and replaced it with _very_. Her _V_ is a harsh tick, but her rounded _E_ and _R_ and the excessive flourish on the _Y_ are so feminine that it is nearly a parody of the way girls write.

Logan's birthday Veronica marks in navy bubble letters, and, on a day when the heat in the library is too stifling to attempt homework, she uses felt-tipped markers to draw an orange and black surfboard stuck in yellow sand. The fourth of March is also Shrove Tuesday, so she adds a stack of pancakes that end up looking like a brown top hat with a yellow pat of butter for adornment. In tidy cursive she writes beneath: _breakfast at Logan's_. Gathering there (either before school or during the time they should be in class) the day before Lent begins has become tradition over the years she has known Logan. Her own parents are not religious beyond a half-hearted attempt at attending church on Christmas and Easter at her grandmother's prodding. Aaron and Lynn Echolls were always quiet when it came to faith – tabloids pounced on this; one claimed to have spotted both wearing Kabbalah bracelets, and Veronica had read that Trina had been spending a good deal of time at the Scientology center whenever she was in Los Angeles – and never went to Mass. Still, Logan had a Confirmation party a few years ago (and probably hadn't been to a service since) that rivaled both Lilly and Duncan's mitzvahs and appeared at school on Ash Wednesday with the ghost of an ashen thumbprint on his brow…at least until he got the chance to wipe it off in the bathroom.

There other dates, other birthdays, in shining gold ink: Meg, Cassidy, Yolanda, Dick, Brian, Johnny, Shelly…

More fluid appointments are written in mechanical pencil or erasable pen, able to modified (_on Lilly's whim_) if something were cancelled: pep squad practice is from three to five on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and National Honor Society lasts until four on Wednesdays. Junior Civitan meets on alternating Mondays, but DECA is every Monday during lunch. Fridays Lilly and Duncan are usually busy – Lilly with dance or gymnastic or some lesson for whatever hobby caught her interest; Duncan with whatever cause his father tried to involve him with – but the latter always tries to wriggle out of it while the former vacillates between pastimes with alarming frequency.

Usually, though, Veronica wiles away the afternoon in Logan's company. They take her car out to the desert or to the beach with her dog lolling in the backseat. She is not supposed to have passengers for her first year of driving, let alone with just a learner's permit, so she babies her mom's old Le Baron as much as she can. She wastes rolls of film on birds and clouds and trees and pictures of his awkward, coltish form silhouetted against the sunlight. She always admires his steady hand with a video camera and can only laugh when he gets in tight to capture the look of concentration on her face or when he strikes up interviews random passerby about fictional 'social issues' or scandals.

She (_used to be_) is the kind of girl who makes cards for her friends. She always sketches two drafts – one on lined notebook paper torn from whatever spiral journal she has on hand, another on higher quality parchment. After Mom and Dad splurge to buy her a nice new computer at the start of her sophomore year ("Since you did so well last year," Mom had said, all but beaming), she experiments with Photoshop, adding multiple layers and special effects, and digs through her shoebox of scrapbook decals and puffy paint until she finds the right texture ribbon. She gives them for any achievement, not just holidays – for Logan when he wins an award at the summer camp he had spent all spring and early summer swearing he did not want to go to, for Meg when she loses the part she wanted in the fall musical revue to a senior with less talent, for Lilly going on to a regional gymnastics competition, for Duncan's soccer team missing the goal that would break the tie at counties. 

For special occasions, she bakes. Neither Lilly nor Duncan (_could_) can stand chocolate. Lilly's vice is pastries, which Misses Kane forbids. Lilly, with her tendency to overindulge, does not need the carbohydrates, is the argument. The first time she overhears that exchange Veronica goes home and makes Lilly cupcakes that she frosts in purple and lime green and covers in rainbow sprinkles. Though she has no special fondness for them herself, she bakes Duncan peanut butter cookies – his favorite – and drags fork tines across the obverse. Logan's birthday always calls for brownies, almost sickeningly rich and heady, where Veronica's solution to the mix she pours into the pan tasting too sweet is to add more chocolate.

She keeps her agenda after Lilly dies. 

There is no significant reason. It is not as if she is trying to cling to the last vestiges of the life she once knew. She just needs somewhere to keep track of tests and quizzes and homework. It was not expensive or even particularly pretty. It came from a tacky little shop on the boardwalk sandwiched between Raymundo's Snack Shack and a stall selling wind chimes shaped like strawberries, and was covered in cheap pink fabric a machine had punched through with cheap yellow thread to make it resemble brocade. It is just…useful. 

In harsh black marker, she slashes through every club, every extracurricular activity that once seemed so vital. The first to go is pep squad, which she never returned to after the car wash, then Honor Society and Junior Civ, because she cannot bear the relentless feel of Duncan's eyes upon her. She never formally quits DECA, just stops going, and, after a few months, her chemistry teacher stops pulling her aside to ask whether or not she is coming.

That year, Lilly does not turn eighteen. The twenty-fifth of December only represents the holidays without her friends, without Mom, without herself and her friends falling asleep in a tangle of limbs in Logan's pool house after watching a bootleg copy of the _Star Wars Christmas Special_ following his parents' party, without spending seven of eight days of Chanukah at the Kanes'. Dad buys her a sweater that does not fit and a camera she knows he could not afford to apologize, to make up for this Christmas without a tree in an apartment still filled with cardboard moving boxes.

Time melts after

(_that party she should have never gone to_)

the New Year.

She is broken, dirty (_filthyfilthyfilthyfilthyfil_–).

School does not make sense anymore, and her grades plummet. She had always been a good student – better than good, the part of her mind that does not mind bragging supplies. She did not have Lilly's talent for numbers or Duncan's shrewdness or even Logan's ability to persuade people to believing that his way of thinking was the best, given half a chance and a sheet of paper. She had always enjoyed school, learning and asking questions and doing research, but suddenly it was just so _hard_. Her grades slipped from a 4.0 to a 2.88 to a 1.5. Though the grief counselor Neptune High had called in had done her best to reassure her ("your transcript won't change; everyone knows you've been having a hard time"), she had stared at the black numbers for an interminable period, not quite comprehending. Two _D_s and a smattering of _C_s, with an _E_ in chemistry, which had seemed so fun and interesting at the beginning of the year. Hell, even Lilly had done better than that, she thinks; Lilly, who in her own words "rocked the scoreboard" when it came to calculus and practical law, but scraped a sixty-nine in musical theatre (which had amused her to no end) because she refused to sew a felt puppet. 

Veronica is failing gym. (_How_? She did not even know that was possible.) She hates changing out for class now, hates the feeling of being revealed to others.

She and her best friend used to take baths together in grade school until suddenly Lilly was ten or eleven and Misses Kane decided it "wasn't proper". After Veronica herself hit puberty, she started changing into her pajamas in Lilly's walk-in closet whenever she spent the night. Lilly never had a problem with revealing herself to others and made fun of her, but she would always trail Veronica into the school's bathroom, leaning against the stall door while, within, Veronica swapped her clothes for the standard-issue kit.

Even after she did not have Lilly, it was okay. The winter uniform was sweatpants and baggy shirts and the teacher did not mind if Veronica wore a long-sleeved shirt beneath, but the spring uniform started on March first.

Back in the fall, she had ordered shorts a size larger than what she normally wore because Lilly asked her to. "Just in case I forget mine," Lilly said. "Or in case you forget yours. Whatever." After Lilly switched out – something to do with a guy, but wasn't everything when it came to Lilly? – Veronica was left with two sets of the warm weather uniform.

Amy Stanton had come back from winter break several sizes smaller than she had been, with a scar she claimed was from a nasty bout with appendicitis. (Not even sweet, naïve Meg believed her.) Amy had been more than willing to exchange her now-too-large uniform for Veronica's, though not without snidely remarking about disinfecting it.

"It's not mine," Veronica had snapped with a fierceness that had surprised her. "It's Lilly Kane's."

Though the culottes scraped the edges of her knees and the shirt fell to her hips as shapeless as a paper bag, all Veronica could focus on was the pale, skinny expanse of her shins and forearms. Did she really used to roll her shorts two or three times at the waist? What if someone was looking at her? What if (_he_) they (_he, he, he,__** he**_) got the wrong idea? What if (and this is where her skin crawled) **H**e was looking at her?

She sits at the top of the bleachers, every inch of skin below her neck covered, keeping her coat swathed about her. The temperature had soared close to eighty degrees; spring had arrived early with a vengeance. On the soccer field below, a few of the boys had pulled off their shirts, several of the more confident girls, Madison Sinclair among them, had shrugged out of theirs to reveal the camisoles beneath. Beyond throwing away that melted tube of Blistex in her bag, Veronica had not let the heat affect her – she always dressed in layers, had ever since _It_ happened, and, oh, God, what is she going to do in the summer? It is only March.

March fourth.

Yesterday would have been her parents' twenty-fifth anniversary, if Mom had not left.

Today, Logan is sixteen.

He does not look any older; in fact, he seems younger and more vulnerable, if that is even possible. He is out of control lately, spending more and more time in the company of Dick and the other trust fund kids who planned on an exciting career in and out of rehab, appearing at school infrequently. He was thrown off the swim team just the week before, only two weeks into the season. Something to do with smoking a joint on the team bus, and she thinks that the girl she used to be would have made excuses, would have probably laughed and teased him about at least screwing up with style while pretending not to be scandalized.

Now, however, he is standing on the bleachers, holding court among the 09ers. He looks smacked and he is drinking amber liquid concealed in a plastic bottle that, despite the yellow and blue label, she is certain is not Nestea. He has always been loud and disruptive, but she can hear him carrying on about his party this Saturday night as if he were seated beside her. The guys from MTV's _Super Sweet Sixteen_ who have been following him around for a few days now (_like a trashy whore begging for a buck_, she imagines him whining) are chain-smoking and not even paying attention, their concession to the balmy weather.

Logan catches her looking at him and turns away. She cannot see the smirk blossom on his face, but she knows, knows, _knows_ that it is there. His voice drops and she tenses warily, training his eyes on the expressive hands that have always betrayed him.

When he gestures to her, she decides that, whatever he is scheming, she is not going to be around to (_be_) witness the end result.

The teacher believes her when she claims to be ill. Her face is flushed from the heat, and he actually reaches a clammy hand out to touch her burning cheek.

His fault for believing her.

She returns to the harshly lit confines of the school, but, rather than ducking into the health room, she just keeps walking toward the doors that open to the parking lot. She pauses by the exit, just for a moment. The trash can dragged near the office door brims with Starbucks cups and takeout containers and failed tests. She does not think about adding her planner, which slips between someone's poster on ancient Peruvian pottered and spoiled pad Thai.

It belongs there.

After all, Veronica knows exactly what she _needs_ to do. She _needs_ to do her homework so she can get into college and the hell out of Neptune; she _needs_ to write a paper on _Frankenstein_ and Victor's hubris; she _needs_ to make a higher quality copy of a photograph of Misses Enbaum's BMW parked outside her tennis instructor's house while Mister Enbaum was away; she _needs_ to get the calls off the answering machine for Dad and run a background check on a new employee for a small business who had written a check for two fifty.

She does _not_ need to make cards or bake brownies or cover old shoeboxes in garlands and glitter and construction paper.

She is (_still_) no longer that girl.


End file.
